Self-absorption

Juicy all the stories in The Guardian magazine this weekend, including the interview of David Hare to Rev. Rowan Williams. I don't share his views against Capitalism not the necessities to search and propose a new social order, and I am doubtful about the learnings he just extracted from his very recent trip to Kenya, but his words to avoid self-absorption I find inspiring. His photograph in the report is terrible, though _looks like a man without his woman, indeed.

Rev. Williams is considered a priest-poet; as he says, there are things that can be better said by poetry. Agree. It is better and easier. Trust the image, that's all, and people will understand the non-understandable. They say he belongs to a group of Welsh priest-poets, with Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ronald Stuart Thomas in the 20th century, a group founded by George Herbet (1593 - 1633). Herbert is important to Williams, he says, "Herbert is not sweet", and Williams likes this non-sweetness.

I took a glance to some poems of Herbet -really good, much better than the others-, and curiously enough, I have found the word "sweet" in all I chose by chance. It seems to carry the idea of the Prophet Jeremiah in The Lamentations. For example:

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.
 G. Herbert: "Bitter-sweet".

I like it.

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I got my eyes all watery in the coffee shop this morning reading the testimony of Sophie about how she lost her husband in a tragic accident in Egypt during their honeymoon. A sad and devastating story, very well told.

In addition, The Guardian extracts the story written by Ben Mezrich about the young boy from Utah that tried to steal the lunar vault with all the moon rocks from the Johnson Space Center to sell it and start a new life with his new girlfriend, Rebecca, whom he met one day while cliff-climbing. The story kept me captivated! The boy wants to become an astronaut without an engineering degree and manage to get himself inside the space training program. He becomes close to the old researcher who was first to study the pieces of rock brought to Earth with the Apollo missions and have the chance to contemplate the vault. At the same time the boy, who is married at the age of 23 to a model in Utah, falls for Rebecca, who joins him in his crazy idea of stealing and selling the a lunar rock to someone he could find. They think they have found a buyer, a collector from Belgium, and arrange a meeting to exchange a piece of rock for $100,000 (worth much more many-folds than this), in a Sheraton hotel in Orlando, Florida. The collector and a companion of his happens to be FBI, police or whatever and they got caught. The boy gets seven years and a half of prison, and gains the divorce of his wife.

It is a powerful and rich story, full of human insight.

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Facundo Cabral got killed in Guatemala today, apparently by hired assassins. I have looked at some of his songs and very pleasantly I found this. This song, he sometime sang with Alberto Cortez, my father used to sing to me when I was a child.

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Indeed, life is pulsating life in every corner. Oh, Lord, give me eyes to see and ears to listen. Give me a heart to live. And keep me safe from the virus of self-absorption!

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